For several years, there has been increased concern for protecting children's access to controlled substances, sensitive material, and inadvertent access to sensitive materials. However, the art has generally failed at creating such a device. Particularly with pill containers, most often young children have the necessary dexterity and skill to open the containers, while ironically the elderly have an arduous task in opening a pill container on their own. It is not uncommon for an elderly person to instruct a young child, who lacks the cognitive ability to know the dangers of ingesting the pills themselves, to open a pill container for them.
It should be appreciated that with controlled substances, such as prescription medications, ingestion of only one or two pills of certain prescribed medications may prove fatal to a child. Thus increased restriction to prescription medication storage devices, such as pill boxes, is desired while improving the ability for the elderly to gain access on their own. Moreover, there is an increasing awareness of the necessity to provide containers for prescribed medications which may otherwise be readily and easily opened by an adult which requires certain manipulation and manual dexterity. When an adult, such as the elderly, who suffers from a debilitating condition, such as arthritis, has the expectation of visits by active and curious grandchildren, they may instruct their pharmacist to dispense their prescribed medications in pill containers that require specific manipulation and manual dexterity with lesser physical effort, but which are still child-resistant.
There are several well-known, so-called, child-proof or child-resistant pill containers in the market, and which are generally employed by dispensing pharmacists for use in filling prescriptions, where the prescription requires that the pharmacist dispense one or more of a plurality of pills, tablets, gel-caps, capsules, or the like. The child-proof or child-resistant pill containers include the so-called “push-and-turn” closures for pill containers, or “arrow-alignment” closures for pill containers. In both cases, the pill containers are of the standard cylindrical variety and fail to meet the concerns realized by the public at large.
One method used today employs a panel inset into a recess formed in a cylindrical container cap, and is slidable into and out of that cap. The device is said to be child safe because it requires the physical pressure to engage a clutch mechanism to the inset panel, thus engaging the cap to open. It is these such containers which most are accustomed and are readily operable by children as young as three (3) years of age, while being inoperable by the elderly or those suffering from arthritis.
Other mechanisms, such as those found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,887,736, may require two simultaneous movements so as to open a container. While it is claimed that the operability of this device exceeds the capabilities of most young children, it also exceeds the dexterity that may be afforded by many adult patients, not including the elderly and those suffering from arthritis.
Additionally, there is an increasing awareness by persons who are in possession of controlled substances, such as prescription medications, to be assured in their own minds that a storage container has not been tampered in the interval between uses. In parallel with the growing concerns for the youth, other concerns include tampering and potentially poisoning feed dispensers or inadvertent access to the feed by animals biting or mechanically agitating a feed storage device.
Thus there remains an unmet need for providing a container which includes a latching device or mechanism to adequately meet the concerns outlined above.